


Beautiful Useless Things

by kingcaboodle



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Crush at First Sight, F/M, Song: Me and My Husband, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-04 17:06:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17902103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingcaboodle/pseuds/kingcaboodle
Summary: "And I'm the idiot with the painted faceIn the corner, taking up spaceBut when he walks in, I am loved, I am loved"





	Beautiful Useless Things

Audrey Horne is born into a family with two children too many, in a house too large for its few occupants. She is placed on the shelves of the Horne family manor. Something to be seen, but never heard. Appraised, but never truly valued. She is beautiful and lonely. Swollen and repressed. The sound of a lone saxophone playing in an empty room, a single dancer in the center of the floor swaying in time to the music long after the party has ended and the band has packed up and gone home.

 

Laura had been allowed to run wild, Donna allowed to foster kindness; but Audrey, Audrey had festered into something beautiful and useless. Taking up space there at the Great Northern. For even with her film noir makeup and designer outfits, Audrey Horne is nothing more than a pretty thing lost among the pines and the sound of the falls.

 

That is until the arrival of Special Agent Dale Cooper.

 

From the moment of their first encounter, she knows she is seen. He looks at her like he can see through her, through the bullshit of her father’s money and her own naiveté. She knows he can, has been on the other side of those probing dark eyes, the eyes that had seen through her slipped note almost immediately.

 

_“Audrey, there’s something you’d like to tell me.” His eyes pierce through her with an intensity she has never found in Twin Peaks. Eyes dark, like the black liquid in the cup sitting in front of him. A cup of black coffee, pungent, intense – she isn’t sure which is headier, the coffee or his stare._

_“There is?” She plays stupid. Stupid Audrey Horne, always coy, never letting on that she had a clue what was going on in the world around her. That’s how it worked around here after all._

_But Agent Cooper isn’t deterred by her games, isn’t slowed by the way she cocks her head as though it’s a wonder she’s managed to keep herself breathing through his sentence, let alone slip him a covert note. “You slipped this note under my door the night after last,” he says, the offending slip of paper slid carefully between them. He holds her gaze steadily, and she finds that, no matter how easily it might’ve been in the past, she cannot slip away this time._

_“I wanted to help you.”_

Her admission had come with the liberation that, she soon found out, followed speaking one’s truth. Audrey had never felt so useful before, had never felt so alive – even as the special agent, _her_ Special Agent had offered her a warning: _“Audrey, that rightward slant in your handwriting indicates a romantic nature. A heart that_ yearns _.” A sip of black coffee. “Be careful.”_

Her heart had never yearned for anything before, but now she yearned to be held close the way he held that tape recorder he was always carrying around. To be whispered to and cradled as though she, too, were the most important thing in his world. The thought is embarrassing, to say the least; her comparison jumbled in schoolgirl metaphor and the few snippets she had seen of her Special Agent’s personality over the breakfast table. But it was her nature, after all.

 

A romantic nature. She had never tasted romance, but she decides that it tastes of black coffee and just a hint of jelly donuts. Audrey takes up drinking black coffee, continues to wear the perfume he had complimented on their first encounter. She writes him notes in her impeccable script, always slanting her handwriting to the right, and leaves him messages when he’s gone off to the sheriff’s department before their unscheduled breakfast conversation slot.

 

For though it was true that her heart yearned, Audrey Horne had finally tasted what it was like to be truly seen.  

 


End file.
